


cease and exist

by gentlelentil



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Hannibal Lecter Being Hannibal Lecter, Hmm dunno?, M/M, Someone Help Will Graham, Weird Plot Shit, Why Did I Write This?, dreamscape, the plot chickens
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-01
Updated: 2018-07-10
Packaged: 2019-04-30 02:28:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14486796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gentlelentil/pseuds/gentlelentil
Summary: y'all get contemplative hannigram. I seriously cannot deal with how achingly in love they are. Also: it will get normal trust me. I just need this.





	1. Chapter 1

"An organ accompanies a hymn, haunts a funeral, and celebrates a wedding. No one is there when it is alone, and ultimately given no purpose. How can an instrument provide any use when no one is around it? How does it serve the world? And is it a pure imitation of sound?What truly is a melody to us may be equivalent to nails scratching on a chalkboard to others. Others being those who do not process sound in the human form. What are they hearing if it is ultimately created as a medium for worship, mourning, and matrimony all within only the human ability to articulate these emotions, even when that itself is limiting? 

"Who we are as people, Will? We are inherent to humanity, but not of it. We are not organs, although we try to be. We are instruments of nature." 

Let's begin in a room, darkly. light eats at shadow. 

shadow is stillness. it is a thick substance attaching itself to movement. and light eats it as a bird of prey swallows rodents whole. we are left with the bones of it. 

photography, the documentation of negatives and positives. the congruency of shadow and light being they cannot be experienced or exist without the other. 

will graham is a man whose outline is filled with shadow, whose exposure to brightness can only be the space banished from it. he stretches longer with each passing hour until the sun comes too close for his liking, and burns brightest the moment before it's extinguished. 

wills mind works tirelessly to reflect what others cannot fathom in the third dimension, the way a shadow is never explained as an object but looms over whatever its casting upon. his neurons peruse the absent perpetrators darkest parts, whose grisly scenes illuminate their own.  

TV static crackles from 11:00 to 4:00. The rugged man sitting across from it groggy from the video noise it emits. He's tried to turn it off once, and then a second time. He keeps coming back and he doesn't know why.

Maybe the trance like state is better rest than the sleep he's been getting. It's better to stare at static, at radio snow. Better than oozing visceral red and plasma between his fingers, remaining the temperature of 98.6 from a body that's not his.

He wants to laugh at this, at how man considered it a luxury, at one point, to have a moment of silence to think. And now all he wants is noise to drown it out. There are too many thoughts in his head to begin with. Too many, it would seem, to have any time to explain their origins. 

Winston, his dog, nudges his head against Will's thigh in his sleep. The TV light glows unevenly on the surfaces it touches. Almost unsure. Responding to nothing and therefore everything. Will feels the same


	2. will's dreams

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> first we must understand will's dreaming life, and we must eventually face the parts of ourselves we push the farthest away

Each time he nods off he finds himself in familiar places not quite resembling the physical nature that is true to them in waking life. The contrast between subject and object is much starker. His dreams are pained in grays.

In his classroom, Will cannot speak or move. He believes the screen behind him used to project the products of monsters is piercing his back, and he can't bear to look at it. 

The light washes the backs of his hands and the knit of his sweater on his forearms until they are ghost like and without texture. It reminds him that here, all that matters is the negatives. He can't see anything the light doesn't touch, but it is all he can think about in these moments.

The classroom, usually full of students with seats that rise above where he stands to lecture, is switched around. He is on a tall glossy stage meant for a magician. But he knows better; he is a spectator chained to his act, and never made to transform pencils into flowers or pull rabbits out of hats. The seats are near the base of this impossibly tall stage. They could barely see him from here. 

Here, his mind is safe with the dwellers in it that commit atrocities. The screen is illuminated behind him. He has risen as they have, the killers he hunts and uses as examples for students at the academy. 

They can go home. They can end their visit with a succinct closing of a notebook. For Will, the visits are all hours, weekends, holidays, waking life, sleeping life. There is no other option.

Will, as cunning and intuitive as he is, utilizes denial like any other human being. He stretches only his fingertips in the light, seeing the shadow beneath him never falter. There is a loud bang that never comes, a voice that never carries. But the looming is enough. It is elementary knowledge that shadows have dimensions. And Will doesn't want to discover how many are possible.


	3. Chapter 3

The house is the most silent at noon. The trees mark the makings of an island in Wolf Trap. The sea of satellite laps at the shore of Will's porch. His dogs trot around the yard and make home in this little place. The only sounds are like the sun, from a distance and threatening to burn him. 

His skin is made out of little hands that must touch the point of contact a body has made with direction or drive. The body is an oracle of a time Will didn't know was possible. A crystal ball for his crystal vision. The body is language for a killer. A biopic, a myth, or a comedy, what trauma could author someone's death? Highly sensitive, Will was. Prone to answers he rarely sought. 

Often, in hours of silence, he grinds up a mixture of medicine. He pushes it into his pipe and holds a flame to its dryness until it fills his lungs like fluid. Drowning while gravity has him under her thumb and Will can still sit deep, deep into the hearth of his own island without sinking.

"Tell me, what anchors you, Will?" Hannibal asks. Will is sitting stiffly in the chair across from him and the tips of his shoes point to him and the door. Both of them in the sea of satellite. They churn static between their words. 

"I'm not sure I understand, Dr. Lecter." It feels like drowning, surely, to have any weight. "I don't see myself as the floating type. I'm not very surface level."

"On the surface? Certainly not. But what roots you, Will?" Hannibal persists. "What is down there, in the depths of the trench you find yourself in again and again? Something that pacifies you when the waves threaten to sweep you away."

Will's fingers meet the edge of the arm rest. "I believe that is the problem. The water is always above me. In my lungs. Everything around me pacifies me, Doctor." 

He tries to pin down Will's uneasy gaze. His eyes weave through the bullets until he's looking at the corner of his therapist's rug on the floor. It's folded over to see the plastic grid underneath. Blood.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry, I'm just trying to find my way through the plot.


End file.
